It Wasn't the Jurors Fault

By Lou Cannon
Sunday, October 8, 1995; Page C07

When a mostly white Simi Valley jury in 1992 acquitted four Los
Angeles police officers accused of beating Rodney King, the jurors were
blamed for ignoring videotaped evidence and igniting the deadliest riots
since the Civil War.

Currently, a mostly black jury is under fire for ignoring a mound
of DNA evidence and acquitting O. J. Simpson almost without
deliberation.

But jurors in both trials were ordinary citizens who performed
their civic duty under intense pressure. More worthy of criticism are
the questionable decisions of public officials who stacked the deck
against the prosecution.

California judges unnecessarily put the trial of the police
officers in suburban Simi Valley. Paying as little attention to legal
precedents as the jurors would later be accused of doing to the
evidence, an appellate court granted a change of venue because of
political turmoil and extensive media coverage in Los Angeles in the
wake of the King beating.

These were dubious grounds. No change of venue had been granted in
a Los Angeles County trial in nearly two decades, even in such notorious
cases as the Charles Manson murders.

Stanley Weisberg, the trial judge, compounded the problem by
keeping the trial in the same media market. He merely moved it across
the county line from racially diverse Los Angeles to Ventura County,
where there are few blacks.

In the Simpson trial the prosecution stacked the deck against
itself. District Attorney Gil Garcetti, who was elected because of
backlash to the riots, had a choice of trying Simpson in downtown Los
Angeles or Santa Monica, near Simpson's Brentwood home.

Garcetti amazingly chose a downtown trial even though he knew that
the demographics of the Santa Monica area would produce a more diverse
jury pool. Like Weisberg, he seems to have been motivated by reasons of
convenience. He may also have assumed that the evidence was so
overwhelming that it made no difference where Simpson was tried.

But race matters in criminal trials, as in other aspects of
American life. Jurors in both cases deny that their verdicts were
race-based, but racial perceptions influenced the way they viewed the
evidence.

The Simi Valley jury, with 10 whites and no blacks, was composed of
people who saw police as their guardians. These jurors pulled over for
police cars. They could not understand why King ignored the lights and
sirens of a California Highway Patrol car and led police on a high-speed
freeway chase.

When the Simi Valley jurors watched the famous videotape in its
entirety rather than the truncated version used on television, they
found out that King had charged at Officer Laurence Powell, who
delivered most of the baton blows. When they also learned from testimony
that the accused officers had tried to take King into custody peaceably
before any blows were struck, they bought the defense argument that King
was responsible for what happened to him.

The Simpson jurors, nine of them African American, had a more
hostile view of police. Blacks in Los Angeles have long complained of
humiliations at the hands of the LAPD, which doesn't always play by
constitutional rules. These jurors dismissed as lies the police
testimony that detectives went to Simpson's home to tell him of Nicole
Brown Simpson's death; they realized that the real mission was to search
the premises.

Such warrantless searches are common, but few murder defendants can
afford the legal resources to expose them. Simpson could. The illegal
search tainted the prosecution case from the beginning, and the taint
became tarnish with the disclosure of detective Mark Fuhrman's racism.

Fuhrman's racist views were well known within the LAPD, and the New
Yorker reported before the trial that the defense intended to exploit
them. The extent of prosecution knowledge is unclear, but Garcetti could
have learned the truth with a single phone call.

Jurors inevitably bring personal experiences into the courtroom,
which is why jury diversity is so important. It is often forgotten that
even the Simi Valley jury disagreed on a principal charge against
Officer Powell, who would have been retried in state court had not the
federal government taken over the prosecutions after the riots.

Most analysts of the Simi Valley trial believe the defendants would
have been convicted if the same evidence had been presented to a
racially diverse jury in Los Angeles. Similarly, a conviction or
mistrial might have resulted if the evidence against Simpson had been
presented to a racially diverse jury in Santa Monica.

Both verdicts are troubling, but the juries had reasons for their
actions. Those who deplore the verdicts as unjust should focus their
criticism not on amateur jurors who were doing their best but on elected
officials whose faulty decisions produced juries that lacked the balance
of diversity.